Installing Howl

Howl is developed on Linux, but it builds on other *NIX platforms as well such
as FreeBSD and OpenBSD (with other *BSDs presumably requiring only little
work). It should be possible to port to OSX or Windows, should any brave soul be
willing to put in the work.

You can install Howl by building it from source, either from a release or by
cloning the repository from Github.

Latest release

The latest release of Howl is 0.5.3. It was released at 2017-11-07, and is
available for download from:

Building Howl from source

Build requirements

wget: For auto-downloading build dependencies (only needed when building
from a code checkout, as the release tarball contains pre-downloaded
dependencies).

GTK+: Version >= 3, with development files.

For example:

On Debian-based based systems you would need the libgtk-3-dev package.

For Fedora you would need the gtk3-devel package.

C compiler: Howl has a very small C core itself, and it embedds a few
dependencies built in C.

Building

Download and unpack a Howl release, or get the source from
Github, either by cloning the repository
or by download a Zip-file of the desired branch/tag.. Compile Howl by issuing
make from the src directory (gmake for *BSD). When building directly from
a source checkout, in-app dependencies will automatically be downloaded for you
using wget. Once it’s built, you can if you want run it directly as is from
the src directory, like so: $ ./howl. To install it properly however, so
that it integrates into your desktop, you’ll want to run the make install
command.

Howl installs to /usr/local by default, but you can specify a different location to install to
by specifying PREFIX to make, like so:

make PREFIX=~/.local
make PREFIX=~/.local install

NB: If you install to a non-standard location, your desktop environment might
not pick up on the fact that Howl is installed, and the application icon will
look ugly as the result.

Tracking the latest from Github

We developers use Howl every day for our daily development, and we try our best
to keep the master branch stable and suitable for production usage at all times.
If you want to follow along with the latest updates for Howl, simply clone the
repository from Github and build as per the above instructions. To update just
pull the latest additions, and issue make again from the src directory. Don’t
forget to make again though, as this would cause stale byte code to be loaded
and confusion to arise.